Cheeky chat software accuses judge of not having a life.

Full Story at vnunet.com: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2142532/brit-program-wins-prize

A British computer chat program, called George, has won an international prize for holding the most convincingly human-like conversation.

Mr Carpenter told the BBC News website that the win was a first for an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that learns from its interactions. "Though Jabberwacky, and the George character within it, remain distinctly unusual in their behaviour, the fact that they work at all, and that they've improved greatly over the last year, is a testament to the power of context."

Full BBC News story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4263278.stm

George, one of the first Jabberwacky Your Bot characters, has won Hugh Loebner's Bronze Medal and $3000 prize for its creator, Rollo Carpenter. George was judged the 'most human'.

"A huge thank you to Hugh Loebner, who has created, single-handedly sponsored, doggedly defended and repeatedly orchestrated this excellent Turing Test event. Thank you also to all those who have chatted at Jabberwacky.com - the AI has borrowed your intelligence to achieve this prize."

Talk to George: http://www.jabberwacky.com/chat-george

Results: http://loebner.net/Prizef/2005_Contest/results.html

Transcripts: http://loebner.net/Prizef/2005_Contest/Transcripts.html

Start creating Your Bot - your persona: http://www.jabberwacky.com/yourbot

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of verbal abuse in spontaneous human-chatterbot conversations. An ethnographic study suggested that abuse is pervasive and may reflect an asymmetrical power distribution, where the user is the master, and the chatterbot the slave. We propose that verbal aggression in this setting may be a social norm applied by users to differentiate themselves from the machine in what can be regarded as a form of interspecies conflict. The findings stress the importance of naturalistic, ethnographic studies to uncover social dynamics of virtual relationships.

A paper by Antonella De Angeli of the School of Informatics, University of Manchester, and Rollo Carpenter of Jabberwacky.

Full Paper as a pdf: http://www.agentabuse.org/deangeli.pdf

'Can machines be?'. Can they be, for all intents and purposes, a specific human individual?

Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper, asked 'Can machines think?', and proposed the Imitation Game, testing machine against human in ability to converse. Turing wrote, '...the odds are weighted too heavily against the machine.' In a new paper, Rollo Carpenter of Jabberwacky and Jonathan Freeman of i2 media research propose to weigh those odds more heavily still. We propose an Impersonation Game, and a 'Personal Turing Test', in which the machine must convince that it is a known human individual.

The new Game will be played, like the old, with a human, a machine and a remote interrogator. The human must be known to the interrogator, and the machine must impersonate that human. The interrogator may be remotely present via the web in a way that Turing is unlikely to have foreseen.

The Impersonation Game is not limited to text, involving a level of technological presence representation that best supports the goal. The interface could be audiovisual, though the test may be passed without. It could use other subtle social communication cues, both those of face-to-face communication like gaze or expression, and representations of near-imperceptible information such as a person's emotional internal and physiological states.

To what degree should the human and the interrogator know each other? Should they have recently met, have known each other as colleagues, or socially? Should they be friends and family? To overcome the unknowable degree of knowing, in order to pass the Personal Turing Test, a machine will play 100 Impersonation Games as 100 different people, known to the interrogators to every different degree, and will win half or more.

If a machine can pass the Personal Turing Test ... it can, too, be an individual in its own right. In the way we understand the words, it will not think or have emotions, yet it will give every appearance of doing so, and will be complex beyond analysis, much as is a brain. What rights should and will it be afforded?

A paper by Rollo Carpenter of Jabberwacky, and Jonathan Freeman of i2 media research, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Full Paper as a web page: http://www.jabberwacky.com/personaltt

Full Paper as a pdf: http://www.jabberwacky.com/s/PTT100605.pdf

NEW! An Addendum

Start creating Your Bot - your persona: http://www.jabberwacky.com/yourbot